It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

Pretty chuffed that my Chrome Extension has earned the Featured Badge 😍

Totally agree. GET vs POST have meaningful behaviour differences in browsers. Use GET for stuff without side-effects, otherwise use POST. The other verbs? Nah. I've always found it easier to be expressive in the URL than the HTTP verb.

If you're a .NET developer and want to learn a @nodejs framework then @nestframework will feel very familiar. Highly recommend.

I created a small repo demonstrating how to build a Chrome Extension using TypeScript, React and esbuild: github.com/mattburrell/simpl… #esbuild #chromeextension

My bundler of choice is esbuild. So quick and great API. Built-in support for TypeScript, CSS and JSX out of the box and it now has ‘live reloading’ enabled in latest version.

10 Docker Commands Every Frontend Developer Should Know by Matt Burrell betterprogramming.pub/10-doc…

I just published Stop Using the JavaScript Notifications API link.medium.com/xCiYwWitowb

Ready Player One

Time for decentralized apps.

Been using artillery and k6 for scripting some performance tests. Much nicer than having to use a clunky complicated UI tool.

Unit tests are a form of insurance. Don’t be uninsured.

Specialize. Niche. Avoid this fate: "Don't call me a resource! Now, excuse me while I spend countless unpaid hours studying for a trivia test that will determine which massive enterprise gets to deploy me to its projects as cost-effectively and fungibly as possible."

When you don’t do TDD, you end up using the debugger as a poor-man’s TDD substitute.

JSON API is complete overkill for simple apis.

You don’t need to worry about code coverage metrics if you’re doing proper TDD. Seems that the obsession with code coverage is related to people not writing tests in the first place.

Sonarcloud is so good. #cleancode

The need for an architect is inversely related to the experience of the dev team. If you get top devs you probably don’t need architects.

Lindy effect.

Rebase > merge when pulling changes into your feature branch.